


distance (the spaces between us)

by thewarsongsoflove



Category: You Are the Apple of My Eye
Genre: F/M, Parallel Universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-13
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:08:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewarsongsoflove/pseuds/thewarsongsoflove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One week, in which two parallel lines meet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	distance (the spaces between us)

**Author's Note:**

> Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet. 
> 
> \- Andy Warhol

Ko-teng has seen her in crowds many times, but this time he knows, with an overwhelming sort of recognition, that he is right. When she turns, it is a vertiginous moment of unreality.

Chia-yi smiles at him; it is perhaps impossible for her to know just how many times he has done this, only to be cheated by a different face and that strange, tugging nostalgia.

“Shen Chia-yi,” he says, and the corners of his mouth turn up without him having to try.

“Ko Ching-teng,” she replies, as if it is ten, twenty years ago.

 

 

Chia-yi comes back into his life as naturally as she’d left. That night, they go for supper, and the next day she is also there, smiling her same smile and laughing at his same jokes.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” he tells her.

She shows him her ring finger, bare, and he wants to take it back – _no, you’ve changed completely. You didn’t use to be so sure of us._

“I have. You just can’t tell,” she says. They buy ice cream and take a long, meandering walk on the outskirts of Taipei. “Don't you have to go to work?”

“I work from home,” he tells her, thinking about his laptop and the novel he won’t ever show his editor, about the one girl from high school he never managed to forget.

“You’re still lazy, aren’t you?” she says, giggling.

“Except now you don’t get to stab me with your pen,” he retaliates.

“Don’t I?” Chia-yi asks, staring at him with an searching sort of gaze. Ko-teng’s throat is suddenly tight.

She slips her hand into his, and it is suddenly, _decidedly_ not twenty years ago. Ko-teng keeps his eyes to the front, his heartbeat thudding in his ears. Her hand in his – there is only so much he can handle at once. But he is scared by years of remembering and not having. He turns; her face in profile, her face, her, right there.

Chia-yi kisses him first. It is new and familiar all at once; Ko-teng feels dizzy with it. He slides his hands to the small of her back, pulls her close as he leans against the railing.

“You should have seen what I wrote on my side of the lantern,” she tells him.

“I don’t want to know,” he says, convinced that it couldn’t be better than this.

She catches his eye; Ko-teng sees a brief flash of sadness, but there is only amusement when he takes a closer look.

“It’s all in the past, I guess,” she says. “We can’t change it.”

He switches their positions in an instant, pressing her against the railing. “We won’t change it,” he tells her. There is no reason for him to think about the past, now that he has _this_ present.

 

 

There are no letters for him when he gets home, only an e-mail from his editor with the first proof of his latest story. He scrolls through it, not concentrating, and then goes to bed with the memory of a quiet street outside Taipei, and a happiness that has waited ten years.

 

 

Ko-teng takes her home on the fourth day. Neither of them really say it, but the look she gives him when he offers to see her home tells him that it is okay. Expected, almost.

He takes her coat like a gentleman, hanging it on the coat rack that rarely sees anyone’s coats but his own. She tours his apartment in three minutes flat, poking through his tiny kitchen and thumbing through his bookshelf.

“Oh,” she says, in mild surprise, “your shelf.” Ko-teng doesn’t have the heart or courage to stop her when she picks out the loosely bound stack of papers, the cover with the words _You are the apple of my eye._ “Didn’t you use to say that to me?” she says.

When she gets no response, she turns to face him. “This, you -”

“Don’t read it,” he says, “I had to have some way of remembering.”

Chia-yi wordlessly puts the sheaf of papers aside, on the coffee table. She trails a careful finger across the spines of the rest of his books.

“Read any of them?” he asks.

She hesitates. “Not really,” she admits. “Not yet.”

“It’s okay,” Ko-teng tells her. She nods.

 

 

They make love on the sixth day, after two nights of sleeping next to each other.

“You haven’t gained a single ounce of weight,” Ko-teng says, without thinking, as he watches her undress. He immediately feels sexist, and insensitive – she could have had an eating disorder, could think that that was the only reason he liked her, even though it wasn't even one of them. “You look exactly the way I remember,” he amends.

She smiles in that way of hers, the way that tells him she understands more about him than he does, himself. “Liar. You never saw me like this.”

“I imagined it,” he confesses, before he can think about it. She takes one look at him, startled at his candidness, and then winds her arms around his neck, impish smile just inches from his face.

“So did I,” Chia-yi says, naked against him. He can’t tell if it is her statement, or her body, but he feels a new heat, seductive and intense.

Ko-teng pushes into her while holding his breath. “I don’t know if I’ll last,” he admits, “because you make me feel sixteen again.”

“Don’t hold back, then,” she says, breathless and grinning up at him.

Chia-yi keens when he fingers her, even though he is sure he cannot be very good. Her pelvis jerks, the sudden spasm making him forget to breathe as he orgasms.

 

 

Ko-teng wakes up at four in the morning, finding himself in yet another strange, vertiginous tip – except this time, it is back into reality.

His cock is entirely dry, his body unsticky, lacking the dull hum of post-coital satiation. Outside, in the dark, he examines his bookshelf, and finds the untouched manuscript where he left it months ago. _You are the apple of my eye_ , he reads, but the memories slip and slide around, intent on maddening ambiguity.

On the coat rack is only his coat, on the rung where he had hung Chia-yi’s. He has already begun to forget the colour of hers.

Almost desperate, he powers up his computer. There is one unread message – from his editor. The first proof of his latest story, sent two hours ago. His editor liked to work overnight.

When Ko-teng gets back into bed, he is convinced that the sheets are still warm. Then again, it could have been himself.

 

 

A week later, he is in a crowd again when he remembers – except it cannot be called a memory, because he hadn’t known it before. _Do you believe in parallel universes?_ Chia-yi had asked, once.

 _I wanted a parallel universe,_ she says, _I got the wrong time; it was supposed to be before 2004. I was reckless anyway, because I recognized you – and you recognized me, too. But you were right and we cannot change any of it. Not the present, not the past. Ko Ching-teng, our parallel universe looks exactly the same._

And then Ko-teng is alone in a crowd, once again. The way he’s always been. There isn’t a crowd in Taipei big enough for all this.

In their parallel universe, he’d come back after the fight, brushed the tears from her eyelashes and made it right. In their parallel universe, they were a little bit braver, a little bit surer, but they still weren’t together. And that is why it is five years from 2004 and she’s got nothing on her ring finger while he stays in a one-room apartment running out of bookshelf space.

Shen Chia-yi, he thinks. Yes, I believe in parallel universes.

But they don’t change anything.


End file.
